Moeller's goal, Larry Rohter writes in the NYT piece, was to offer an accurate portrayal of German movies – and movie audiences – during the Hitler regime. “Though most people think of Leni Riefenstahl as the leading filmmaker of the Nazi era, because of the renown of Triumph of the Will and Olympia, that was not actually the case,” Rohter notes.

“‘If you want to understand the movies that people actually paid to go and see, Veit Harlan is the one,’ said Linda Schulte-Sasse, the author of Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema and a professor at Macalester College in Minnesota. ‘He was the Steven Spielberg or James Cameron of his era, and so you have to imagine Jew Süss as a movie with Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson and Brad Pitt.’”